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It has been said that life is like a game of chess. According to Alan Rufus:

to win you have to make a move. Knowing which move to make comes with insight & knowledge and by learning the lessons that are accumulated along the way. We become each & every piece within the game called life.

Stefan Zweig's Chess Story is just that, a brief tale that takes place during a WWII sea voyage to Brazil where the framework of the story revolves around the game of chess. A world chess champion, Mirko Czentovic, hailing from the former Yugoslavia is on board, en route to play South America's best chess players but he is an odd sort, a seemingly autistc man who had been an orphan & was initially unable to spell or communicate with his peers, using his fingers to count.

It was commented that former world chess super star, Bobby Fischer, was most probably autistic but "understood in an extremely analytical manner the spatial dynamics of chess." In spite of many other deficits, "his ignorance said to be absolute" & "with the vacant look of sheep at pasture", Mirko Czentkovic, much like Bobby Fischer, was discovered to have an uncommon affinity for the tactics & strategy surrounding chess pieces & their movement, that becoming the center of his life. For...

where does it begin & where does it end? Any child can learn its basic rules, any amateur can try his hand at it; and yet, within the unalterable confines of a chessboard, masters unlike any others evolve, people with a talent for chess & chess alone, special geniuses whose gift of imagination, patience & skill are just as precisely apportioned as those of mathematicians, poets & musicians but differently arranged & combined.

Also on board is a Scots civil engineer named McConnor, someone who made a fortune in America, loves chess & is headed to a potential new diversion in Brazil and also a mysterious "Dr. B.", in fact a lawyer who had handled the wealth of various religious orders & near royalty in Austria, preventing it from falling into the hands of the Nazis & fleeing for his life to a quieter setting.


The author fills us in on the details of Dr. B's recent incarceration by the Gestapo within the Hotel Metropole in Vienna, a situation of absolute isolation & extreme deprivation, in a room with barred widows, no books or newspapers, not even a pencil, locked in "a black sea of silence". Quite by chance, he comes upon a book of famous chess matches, purloined from a coat while in an outer waiting area near the interrogation room, this seeming to provide his only salvation from insanity.

Or does it? Dr. B. becomes compulsive in the extreme, mentally playing/replaying the games incessantly without an actual chessboard or its pieces. This total fixation, "a delirium of play" turns him into a what might be termed a monomaniac, which curiously is how Mr. Czentovic has been described.

From the moment I began to play against myself, I began unwittingly to challenge myself. Each of my two selves, the black one & the white one, had to vie against the other & each conceived its own ambition,its own impatience, to gain the ascendancy, to win; after each move as White, I was in a fever to know what Black would do.

Each of the two selves exulted when the other made a mistake & became exasperated at its own bungling. Chess was all I could think about. The obsession began to attack my body as well as my mind.

At one point, Dr. B. comments that "playing chess with oneself was as paradoxical as jumping over one's own shadow." This bifurcation or splitting of his personality leads to a breakdown & ultimately, with the aid of a kindly M.D., the prisoner is released from the clutches of the Gestapo's & makes his escape from an Austria that has been annexed into Hitler's Reich & onto a Brazil-bound passenger ship.


During the voyage, Dr. B. watches McConnor, who has lured Mirko Czentovic into a game for $250, a large sum 80 years ago but is proven to be a hapless player, until Dr. B. comes upon the scene & somewhat casually comes to the rescue of McConnor.

While the goings on during the voyage are of interest & the prose is often memorable, I kept thinking that Chess Story seemed like an outtake from an intended larger work by Stefan Zweig, had he not decided to book his own one-way passage to oblivion while himself living in exile in Brazil.

With that in mind, I found myself filling in what I decided are missing pieces, including the post-disembarkation charting of Czentovic's various chess tourneys in South America, having McConnor fall in love with a Brazilian chanteuse half his age and turning Dr. B. into a keen fancier of rare birds, butterflies & tropical plants while spending his remaining years in peaceful obscurity. However, at this moment I am still fine-tuning the sequel.


I am no stranger to chess & once played & lost somewhat feebly to a fellow who was a high school classmate, Rex Sinquefeld, later a hedge fund manager & co-developer of the index fund concept, someone who did well enough to endow the World Chess Hall of Fame (with museum) in Saint Louis. As a joke, I wore his name-tag at a recent school reunion because Rex rarely attends these functions, greatly enhancing my popularity but when Rex did show up in his blue Bentley, I gracefully handed over the name-tag & returned to my more accustomed self & my older Toyota.

*Within my review are photo images of author Stefan Zweig; chess pieces being knocked asunder; the Ingmar Bergman film where the knight (Max von Sydow) plays chess with death in The Seventh Seal; and lastly, my former classmate & chess benefactor, Rex Sinquefeld.

**There is an excellent, very gripping film version of the book by the German director Philip Stölzl, though it does at times take considerable liberty with Stefan Zweig's story.